Bilinguility and Bilingualism
Hamers and Blanc in their book Bilinguility and Bilingualism discuss the regular use of two languages by bilingual individuals and how it has been proven to show a significant impact on language and cognitive functioning. In this book they present four aspects of this influence. Hamers and Blanc study differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in the acquisition of language in children and adults’ linguistic processing, particularly in terms of their ability to retain vocabulary. They state that children learning two languages from birth comply with the same milestones for language acquisition as mono- linguals do but they generally have a smaller vocabulary in each language than monolingual children learning only a single language. Adult bilinguals normally require longer periods of time to retrieve individual words than monolinguals do. Moreover, they also generate fewer words when asked to satisfy a constraint such as alternative words such as synonyms as well as phrases